@Skyler The most widespread German system, The Dark Eye, has all rolls (except damage rolls) follow the rule of "lower is better". I have not had any problems playing systems with "higher is better" with players accustomed to that, so I don't think there's any problem with it in the other direction, either.

@ACuriousMind He's thinking that with high-number-better systems, an untrained character is literally unable to hit high difficulty targets, while with low-number-better systems anyone can potentially roll low enough to do a thing.

In Fate, a roll for an action isn't a binary pass/fail outcome. It can result in failure at cost (3 or more under the target); failure (2 or less under the target); tie (hitting the target); success (2 or less over the target); and success with style (3 or more over the target).

And there are a number of ways to negotiate your way up the scale if you roll poorly or don't have the raw modifiers to accomplish your goal.

At its simplest, if you fail a roll you can suggest to the party that you succeed anyway, but a Bad Thing also happens.

Also, the table is generally encouraged to argue collectively about what counts as "with style" or "at cost" instead of the GM deciding it. I think that's maybe an even larger difference to D&D style tests than the non-binariness of the outcomes

For instance, PbtA games also implement "success at cost", but it feels very different to Fate because there it's explicitly the GM who is supposed to offer the player a hard choice between several outcomes with "cost", and sometimes the moves themselves already contain a rather strict list of what outcomes you can choose from.

@GreySage Well, the binariness does come from the system, but it feels less like a violation of its design principles to introduce levels of success than it would be to allow the group to negotiate as equals what the outcome of an action is.

@ACuriousMind that being said failure at a cost is really dangerous in DnD at the lower levels in particular, since that's almost always felt a lot more than success with style and it's easy to get low rolls

@Skyler The GM (Game Master; "Dungeon Master" is a D&D-specific term of art) is responsible for flow and coherency, and representing the setting. Often in Fate the scenarios are also determined with a high level of collaboration, though that's not necessary.

@ACuriousMind I think 13th Age came closest.

@trogdor Going by the "if it says it's a dragon, do you argue?" metric, this is definitely a dragon:

Long-lost alligator snapping turtle rediscovered 30 years after it was thought extinct in Illinois http://bit.ly/2htpXY6

@BESW Sure, but what sort of consequence that does not debilitate the character in some way wouldn't be a mere countdown to a consequence that does debilitate them? I guess I was trying to get a feeling what @Skyler was actually asking for, maybe I'm parsing things too literally here

@ACuriousMind A bloody nose, a blinding need to prove oneself, a fear of robots, needing to load a new clip of bullets, losing faith in one's friend... there's a LOT of space between "I'm fine until I run out of hit points completely" and "anything that happens to me is debilitating."

Cthulhu Confidential, being a system designed for one-on-one play for cynical noir storytelling, makes an art out of having awful things happen to the PC without removing their agency (because then there's nobody to continue the story).

@Skyler Fate's dice provide a bell curve from -4 to +4, with a very strong tendency toward the middle of the curve. Skill modifiers are usually between +0 and +3, up to +5 in really pulpy adventure games.

I think the highest difficulty target I've ever seen was about +15, and that was RIDICULOUS.

E.g. a druid-cum-panther was dragged off the edge and plummetted. Unbeknownst to the rest of the party he quickly activated a charm (gift from elsewhere) that feather falled him. On his next turn everyone else bemoaned his death... until--with his climb speed--he came racing right back up the side of the tower and burst back into the fight =)

@nitsua60 Seems I missed a message from you a day or two ago about polling some AL DMs about runtime on an adventure. Sounds like "these 10 guys did this" would be an improvement on the current accepted answer of "this one guy (me) did this" and the runner-up "we did this previously, and are on track for X now"

@inthemanual Cool. And I tend to favor putting more on the table than less. I feel like it's easier to take one's foot off the gas a bit without being toooo obvious about it than it is to step things up mid-fight without appearing to unfairly tilt the table.

My biggest complain about Fate's resource system is that you either have Stress tracks which are narratively dull and reset very often and Consequences which are narratively juicy, but bulky, difficult to remove and generally something that you want to avoid.

Cue Sticky Conditions, which are semi-narrative "ticks", reset painlessly when a specific action is taken and generally feel like making effort rather than suffering damage.

I can choose to take a 2-consequence and be sucky for a bit OR I can choose to put it into a Paradox box, but the next time I get Paradox and it overflows the box, I get a Consequence for the entire the value of the box.

so like a choice of "take bad now or delay to quite likely get something worse"

In ShadowCraft when you fail a roll to control magic, the magic still happens exactly as you like it--but you gain an aspect representing some way channeling the magic has transformed you. This can be beneficial, like gaining armor-tough skin or the ability to walk through walls.

But if you collect five of these magic aspects, the magic consumes you and you become an NPC controlled by the source of your power.

So the narrative is that doing magic that produces an effect that is impossible to achieve non-magically (say, stop time or bounce bullets off your skin) makes all sorts of random backlash effects, such as turning your hair to aluminium or teleporting your fingernails to Mars.

the more grandiose the magic you do, the worse the backlash is

but, in the original system, not all Paradox backlashes get resolved immediately - some of it accumulates.

if you accumulate lots of Paradox, gaining more makes you prone to a backlash that will leave your smoking shoes in the middle of a crater

but, if you're really careful, the accumulated PAradox will dissipate over a time

@BESW Paradox is basically "reality kicking oyu in the butt for enforcing your will through Magick." It can range from "Milk gets sour around me" (1 point) to "Godbyeandthanksforallthefish" from the mage (when he gets tossed into a paradox realm)

2 effects ged rid of paradox instantly: feeding it to a familiar, or getting thrown into a paradox realm. All other stuff... has to wane off. Like Milk gets sour around you for a week, then the point is gone.

so, you get paradox, any amount, one of the three things happen: 1) you don't get a backlash, it goes to the pile, 2) you get a backlash and some (possibly all) of the paradox in the pile joins for extra nastiness, 3) you don't get a backlash and are super careful for the next /period/, the pile slowly dissipates without any adverse effects.

In Mage, Paradox doesn't really say "you've cast a Fireball successfully, but it also exploded your car", it rather says "you've cast a Fireball successfully, but it also made you see upside down for a week"

In the book I think there are four or five Paradox backlash types in order of increasing severity. Let me think, there's straight up damage, then a Flaw, which is like a lasting inconvenience up to a serious problem, then you can be visited by a malevolent Paradox spirit which dukes it out on you, you can be teleported into your own personal Paradox hell for punishment, you can summon a devastating Paradox Storm which randomizes your immediate surroundings...

and finally, if you accumulate lots of Paradox very slowly you can fall into a Quiet, which is a state where you can't consciously use magic, but you do it subconsciously, manifesting your beliefs and delusions as real world ephemera.

@BESW I'm not too big on computer slides myself (I find that they often become the thing in a prez, where they're supposed to be a supporting thing) and I still feel filthy about having wall of text slides in my Monday prez :S

@BESW That sounds like a pyromancer thing! I don't remember which game it was, but there was a multiplayer video game that came out with a character who could wield fire. As they used pyromancy, they would increase a "burn" stat which meant they themselves were on fire. They took damage from it, but it made all their pyromancy more powerful at the same time.

Then there were some powerful abilities that could "use up" their burn, by resetting it to 0 but doing something one-off that was more powerful the more burn they had on them.

Taking damage every turn would be problematic for Fate to handle -- it'd be more fun to have powerful abilities you could make more powerful in exchange for taking some harm -- but pyromancers getting extra damage from something proportionate to their heat/burn/whatever would be nice.

> Friendly fire. You can't be compelled because you're on fire, because you're just used to that. You don't take stress from fire, either. If you are on fire, add the value of your highest checked stress box as a weapon rating to fire attacks made by you, and to all physical attacks targeting you.

> Fire, walk with me 2. You can use your turn to change one on fire aspect into a Fireling creature. Its number of stress boxes and its approach ratings are all equal to the number of free invokes the aspect had.

> Fireflight. While you are on fire you can fly. You must succeed on an Overcome check with Athletics to avoid setting any zone you fly over on fire (difficulty determined by flammability of the zone's contents).

@BESW Before there was Powerpoint, we used to suffer "death by acetate" during overly long briefings. Now, it is death by Powerpoint. (re your Having recently taught several PowerPoint classes, I can attest that there's little difference)

@BESW one problem I have with Fate Magic now is that there is a discrepancy between an enabling Overcome action and a helping Create an Advantage. Let's say you're trying to repair a broken engine, but you have zero tools etc. You can use Matter magic to make whatever you need on the spot - cool. If I treat it as an Overcome, then I could say that once you're able to manufacture literally anything on the spot, the difficulty of the subsequent Repair roll is trivial or not even needed.

so, a starting mage specialising in Matter can transmute just about anything into something similar (say, metal to metal) and have something take any shape they want - it's only up to their engineering knowledge to literally manufacture a perfect crankshaft from a pile of scrap, and it's not even that difficult.

@doppelspooker PbtA's lack of anything resembling a DC doesn't mean there isn't a sort of fiated difficulty: The enemies, which are completely up to the DM, are very relevant for the difficulty of fights, and the DM can also adjust how many soft vs. hard moves they make.

that's an unresolved problem from the original game as well - you could basically say that you can "overcome" to teleport enemy's heart to your hand.

and avoid making it a by-the-numbers Attack

@ACuriousMind there are specific rules for making soft and hard moves, so if you want to spam hard moves you need to establish this in the narrative first by foreshadowing or describing narrative resistance

I'd also say not all PbtA games are the same in that regard and some definitely give the GM greater freedom in making moves than others

@BESW especially, but also anyone else that plays Fate: Do you have any game transcripts I could look over? There's some things I see used a lot in stunts that didn't come up in my attempts to play, and I want to see how they play out in a game run by an expert